An all-American sesquicentennial! How often we’ve seen our philharmonics and Carnegie Halls march in lockstep to celebrate the anniversaries of the Mozarts, the Tchaikovskys, the Three B’s. How is it that now, in lockstep, they’re ignoring the 150th-birthday year of our grand Connecticut Yankee Charles Ives, born in Danbury on October 20, 1874?
Could it be that Leonard Bernstein, who in 1951 premiered the magisterial Symphony No. 2 Ives completed a half-century before, sealed the great eccentric’s reputation when he called him “the Grandma Moses of music”? To this day, music lovers who ought to know better still think of Ives as that transformative genius of the insurance business (he pioneered estate planning) who composed on Sundays, leaving behind messy mountains of illegible manuscript.
In fairness, the cartoon label isn’t all wrong. As children of post–Civil War New England, Grandma Moses and Ives did share an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods nostalgia. But Moses—bona fide naïf that she was—never outgrew her origins as an “American primitive.” Whereas for all the Americana Ives drops into his scores, his was the sophistication of a master who started his days at the keyboard, playing Bach.
Though indubitably a child prodigy, young Charlie was spared the circus such talent can provoke. His maverick father, the bandleader George Ives, gave him a thorough grounding in classical theory and harmony while also encouraging experiments in exotica such as quarter tones. To the compositional skills the athletic, outgoing freshman brought with him to Yale, the professors had little to add. “Ives is the godfather of American classical music,” his spiritual heir John Adams has said. “If I were a politician, I would look up to Abraham Lincoln, and as a composer, I look up to Charles Ives.” That’s more like it.
Ives’s catalogue of some 400 works ranges from miniatures to grandly scaled sonatas and symphonies of staggering diversity, celestial or diabolical by turns, gentle or brutal, as consonance dissolves in colliding keys, rhythms, and tempi. For some, the pinwheeling surrealism of his titles alone—Yale-Princeton Football Game; The Celestial Railroad; Central Park in the Dark; Gyp the Blood, or Hearst!? Which Is Worst?!—is reason enough to follow down his rabbit hole. Clock time is no index of the character or complexity of a given piece. The Housatonic at Stockbridge, which recalls the composer’s honeymoon with his soulmate Harmony (née Twichell), conjures a river, a landscape, and intimations of immortality in a matter of four minutes.
Jan Swafford, grandee of Ives biographers, suggests that Ives’s oeuvre is best characterized as “Ivesian,” as Kafka’s is “Kafkaesque.” True, Jan, but circular! In reclaiming remembrances of things past, Ives keeps company with Proust, and also—by way of pregnant musical allusion—with Mahler. In eccentric invention, he bears comparison with Joyce. His command of historic styles rivals Picasso’s. And while we’re at it, why not toss in Einstein, for Ives’s elastic sense of time, and Emerson, who showed the way to transcendentalism?
If you’re ready to start exploring, Joseph Horowitz’s visually frisky, nimble yet authoritative documentary Charles Ives’ America (streaming free on the Naxos Music YouTube channel from October 20) puts you in the picture in a mere 90 minutes. For deeper immersion, an all-free weekend of music and talk by an all-star lineup of Ives champions at Yale (October 26 and 27) would be an excellent gateway. Alternatively, pick up J. Peter Burkholder’s concise, compulsively readable Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America (Amadeus, 2021) and the corresponding Spotify playlists, curated by the indispensable Charles Ives Society.
At a daunting 500-plus pages, Swafford’s Charles Ives: A Life with Music (Norton, 1996) presents the man and the artist with the verve of a best-selling novel. And if Sony Classical’s 22-CD boxed set Charles Ives–The Anthology 1945–1976 (dropping November 29) sounds like an awful lot of a good thing, know that the landmark recordings—including Ives at the keyboard and oral-history clips from those who knew him best—are nothing short of priceless.
“Charles Ives in Context at 150” will take place at Yale University on October 26
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
